Saturday, March 1, 2014

Flows freely, doesn't leak

This afternoon I saw the Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast of Prince Igor by Alexander Borodin. The composer didn't finish the opera, so his friends Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov did. But today's production team went back to the original and put it all together a different way, quite different from what Wikipedia gives for the synopsis. Act 2 is swapped with Act 1. Act 3 was cut (apparently because it had no music by Borodin). The new Act 1 is given a quite different meaning. Igor was an early hero of the Russians, doing his thing back in the 12th Century. Prologue: Igor rouses the crowd to go fight the Polovtsians. A solar eclipse is taken as a bad omen, but they head out anyway. The battle happens during the music between the Prologue and Act 1 and Igor's army is badly beaten. In Act 1 Igor dreams (or hallucinates) in a field of poppies (12500 of them according to the set designer) and envisions a paradise where his captor treats him like a brother. The famous Polovstian Dances are here with dancers between the poppies. In Act 2 Igor's brother-in-law convince the locals to turn away from Igor's wife, declaring the BiL as prince. That scene had a lot of high energy. But the Polovtsians attack the town and the BiL is killed. In Act 3 the palace is in a shambles. Igor returns and begins to rebuild.



After the opera I stopped at Home Depot and told one of the guys my tale of woe of not getting the bathroom drain trap back together. He recommended buying a new fastener for a dollar, and I did. He also suggested I loosen the pipe from the fixture that goes through the wall. It went together pretty well.

That's when I found a good deal of the blockage was between the sink and the trap. I cleaned that out and in the process broke a piece that makes the stopper go up and down. Other than that, it is back together, flows freely, and doesn't leak.

Only then did my home improvement guy return my call. He had been out of town. He said the threads of the fastener are very easy to damage and the Home Depot guy had made the right call. He thinks he has a spare for the part that broke and will come by sometime.

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